distasteful

[truepenny]

Before proceeding to my own woes, I would like to point to misia's post on the transparency or otherwise of writing, especially in an online autobiographical (or semi-autobiographical, or quasi-autobiographical, or pseudo-autobiographical, depending on one's intent) forum like this one. What she says is so very true.

---

Meanwhile, back in Dodge, the miscreants in the jail are plotting revenge on the Sheriff.

Which is to say, I have Latin translations to do for the first time in ... a really long time.

This, I think, is the issue that most completely blindsided me at my defense. I was expecting questions about my argument (although there were surprisingly few), expecting concern and dissatisfaction about my handling of the secondary reading (of which there was a great deal). But I was not expecting my committee to flay me up one side and down the other for having used the Loeb translations of Seneca. I knew they weren't great, but I was frankly providing them merely as a service for readers who didn't feel like resurrecting their rusty Latin. I'd made sure that the Loeb provided the gist of Seneca's meaning and simply moved on. It wasn't an issue I was interested in, and since this was a dissertation in ENGLISH Literature, of which only one chapter dealt with a Latin author, and that much more on the plot and theme and influence level than the language level, I didn't expect my committee to be interested in it, either. That's actually an overstatement; it didn't occur to me that anyone would even notice, much less mention, the matter.

Wrong. Dead wrong. There are more ways to object to a translation than I had ever imagined, and my committee practiced all of them. I've rarely felt so incompetent, naïve and stupid in my entire life.

I felt like a lion thrown to the Christians.

The upshot of it all is that I'm doing my own translations, which may be more work than some of my other options, but is considerably less bother. It doesn't require finding and assessing other translations, just me and a dictionary and squeezing blood out of a stone.

And yes, since you ask, I am bitter about it.

Comments

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Normally, in my department, there are no translation issues. My impression is that it's very unusual for someone to choose to do any work with primary texts in other languages in the original. (Most people suffer the agonies of the damned just trying to meet the foreign language requirements.) Certainly, the fact that, as an undergraduate Classics major, I have knowledge of and relative facility with Latin and Latin texts has been cause for comment more than once.

Thank you for being outraged on my behalf. :)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I ended up doing all my own for Celtic Myth, just to avoid the copyright issue.

Do these people read Latin and have genuine aesthetic/accuracy issues with the Loeb? Or are they really the boneheads they appear?

It's getting very hard to give them the benefit of the doubt.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

It's an old-fashioned, clunky translation, and very literal--which is not always the same as accurate, as we all know.

The issues are genuine. I'm just not personally convinced they're important.

[gwynnega]

Sheesh, that's bizarre. I mean, the Loeb translations may be old and clunky, but they're still also widely available...

[larryhammer]

Would knowing about shower curtains with the complete text of R&J help with the mood?

---L.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Arrrrgh. Hearty sympathies. Sounds like one-up-man-ship to me. "Look how much more literate I am than you, for I can critique the translation you used!"

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Did I ever tell you the sad tale of a friend of mine who prepared a meticulous scholarly edition of an unpublished C15th text as her PhD thesis, only to find out at the viva, that the University in question no longer accepted edited texts, no matter how much work and scholarship and original thought had gone into the process, as worthy of a PhD? Her supervisor should have found this out at a much earlier stage, because the rules had actually changed during the period she was registered.
Profoundest commiserations.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Aieeeeee!

After she'd finished dismembering her supervisor, what did she do?

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Not much she could do by then. Basically said 'stuff it': fortunately she didn't actually need a PhD for professional reasons.

[larryhammer]

Did she find a publisher for the edition?

---L.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

By that stage she just wanted to wash her hands of the whole thing. I assume the thesis itself is held with other MPhil theses at the university (and possibly also in the British Library).

[libskrat]

*angry grumblings about academia's half-assed definitions of "original research" omitted -- don't thank me, just throw money*